Wrike is among the best options for a business that needs to spin up a project management platform quickly. The administrators and team leaders who are managing teams, tasks, and projects are multitaskers by nature, and Wrike excels at helping them juggle all of that information while keeping tasks organized and project workflows moving. The following are 10 features, tools, and hidden Wrike tricks to make managing multiple projects as transparent and stress-free as possible.

1. Custom Workflows One of Wrike's biggest feature additions in 2015 was custom workflows, allowing account administrators to modify default workflows to rename or rejigger statuses and create additional workflows for specific teams. These custom workflows make more contextual sense for specific folders, projects, and teams, particularly when dropped into a dashboard broken down into different stages. For a project administrator or team leader especially, seeing workflows broken down into columns such as Approved, In Progress, In Review, etc., makes the overview and management process easier when tabbing between multiple folders and tasks.

The custom workflows themselves are color-coordinated in stages as with normal workflows, breaking down active, cancelled, finished, or on-hold tasks within a workflow. At the same time, you can add custom workflows sitting parallel in the dashboard that show the specific associated stages in the design, development, or marketing teams, for instance, with completion percentages in another workflow next to that. If your business sprang for a Wrike Enterprise account, take advantage of the custom workflows managed from your central dashboard.

2. Folders, Folders, and More Folders Folders are arguably Wrike's most ubiquitous organizational tools. The platform has different types of folders for everything, each with a different set of permissions and customizable designs to create an intuitive project management file cabinet. First, it's important to pack the Information section in each folder with as many details as possible about project goals, team members, team contact information, and progress on different tasks. Wrike designs folders to be easily transferrable from team to team, and the more information you lay out on the cover, the less digging the next user will have to do.

When it comes to the folders themselves, you can break them down into different types for specific use cases. To save time on task management, an organization can create a sprint folder where teams drop various tasks to keep everyone updated on project progress. For form emails, a support team can create a Templates folder from which to pull consistent responses during customer interactions. There are also Private folders for sensitive human resources (HR) issues or simply a folder set to "Only for You" permissions to use as a granular organizational tool. Finally, teams can use Subfolders to share project information outside of Wrike over specific date ranges, exported as a Gantt chart or Microsoft Excel file.

3. Real-Time ReportsAnother newer feature is Wrike Reports, which automatically generates a real-time visibility report of project statuses and progress, with one-click functionality from the Wrike dashboard. In the Reports tab, a project administrator or team leader can select specific projects or tasks, decide from which teams to pull data, add filters (such as project owner, status, or start/finish/creation date), and generate either a bar or table graph. These kinds of reports are useful for daily or weekly progress updates but can also be tailored to show metrics such as team activity and performance. The data visualizations aren't fancy but they can be created quickly using the most relevant data.

4. Tag Everything Wrike users can create unlimited tags for folders and tasks; they work similarly to the quick tagging found in collaboration tools such as Evernote Business in that the tags work not only as organizational tools but to associate different project elements and documents together. You can tag a task with multiple relevant folders simply by dragging and dropping it into the folders, tagging the task as associated with each folder without duplicating it. Wrike keeps track of all the changing tags associated with a task, so this also helps map the task's status over time, across the different projects and teams with which it's associated.

5. Sort Through the Task Backlog Task sorting is a natural part of managing project workflows but, when prioritizing, it's easy to let too many tasks slide into a Backlog section, taking up more and more of your Wrike timeline. So, within a folder, tasks are listed either chronologically or by whatever custom order you've sorted them. Wrike lets you sort tasks by priority, date, status, and title. To force your team to tackle a backlogged task, set a folder to priority, then drag and drop the backlogged tasks into the order you want to check them off. Sorting by priority overrides dates, status, or title, keeping those backlogged tasks front and center until you check them off the pile.

6. Integrate and Automate Wrike is continually adding new integrations across different Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications including Google's and Microsoft's office suites, different cloud storage services, marketing and help desk platforms, online survey tools (such as SurveyMonkey), and collaboration applications (such as Slack and Atlassian HipChat).

These are all useful ways to merge more of your overlapping business processes into one place, but these integrations can be particularly useful for automating some of the manual aspects of managing projects and tasks. Wrike integrates with both form-automation service Wufoo and automated action tool Zapier, letting users automate recurring project entries with project requests funneling into Wufoo's automatically populating forms (executed by Zapier into new projects without manually forwarding project requests or filling out new project and task entries).

7. Pile On the Templates and Widgets The Wufoo/Zapier integration is great for automating recurring workflows, but so are Wrike's custom templates. To create a custom template out of an existing project or task, right-click on that task in a folder and duplicate it with a new title. It also lets you copy the descriptions and notes you've included along with the task or project, and even lets you copy over the same users if it's a specific team that will be reusing the template. You should never have to manually re-create a project or task. You can also create a template based on multiple tasks by setting those specific tasks to a "deferred" status and repeating the duplication process. Templates are one of the areas Wrike really shines, giving it a tasking and productivity edge over similar project management solutions such as Basecamp.

Widgets are another way Wrike helps you save time. There are pre-built widgets such as Assigned To Me and Due Today/This Week, but the feature is more valuable when creating custom widgets to monitor specific projects, tasks, or team members. In a project or task folder, right-click on the item and choose Add to Dashboard to create a simple widget to drag and drop onto the dashboard as you please.

8. Go Beyond Simple Search Wrike's basic keyword search is quick and useful to find a task or project containing certain words, but the platform's advanced search feature gives you a much more powerful engine to search within specific fields to find keyword in a comment, description, or title. Advanced search can also help you find attachments by letting you search file names. There's no special button or option for advanced search; you simply begin typing in the main search bar (or the search bar within a specific folder) and use quotation marks to specify a field, words, or projects to omit. You can also specify additional parameters such as adding an "@me" tag to find search results in which you have been mentioned by name.

9. Make Email Useful Again Wrike's email integrations make it easy to create and edit tasks from Gmail or Microsoft Outlook on both desktop and mobile, allowing you to turn emails into action items and assign them directly to team members. Through those integrations, you can also see Wrike @mention notifications in your inbox, add emails directly to Wrike folders, and reply to comments directly from email.

On mobile, the Wrike Android and iOS apps also offer a new smart inbox feature to scan, sort, and archive messages with quick swipes, along with the ability to temporarily hide individual or group messages into different bundles, consolidating what used to be Wrike's Activity Stream & Notification Center. As with Google's new Inbox application, it's a way to reduce the clutter and make email a platform on which users can actually get things done (rather than constantly sifting through and cleaning it up).

10. Turn Your Smartphone Into a Project Command Center Along with the new smart inbox, Wrike's mobile applications for Android and iOS can do just about everything the web application can. The Wrike applications include a single task view with date and assignment functionality, quick task creation and swipe actions, and (on the Android application) a dual view for tablets. Project managers and teams shouldn't feel constricted by a web-only mindset in 2016. Much of the time, it's easier to open the mobile application on the fly, check off a task, and move on with your day.

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